#ThinkfullyHabit: Follow slow hunches
Not all ingenious ideas come about in a flash.
Not everyone experiences Eureka moments such as those made famous by Archimedes the Greek mathematician and scientist who worked out that the way to tell if the king’s crown was made of pure gold or of cheaper metal was by the amount of water it displaced. His Eureka moment is said to have come about whilst stepping into his bath and realising that the amount of water displaced was proportional to the weight of the object immersed in it. Or, Isaac Newton who supposedly had his ah-ha! moment when he realised the laws of gravity whilst lying under a tree as an apple fell on his head.
Sometimes ideas click together less immediately and less obviously.
“A lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people’s minds.”
WHY?
The lightbulb moment isn’t the only way that ideas click together. Rather than being despondent if you rarely experience ‘ah-ha moments!’, we can take heart in what science historian Steven Johnson calls ‘the slow hunch’. In contrast to those moments where ideas fall into place instantly, the slow hunch sees them click into place gradually over a much longer period of time*.
It usually starts with a kernel of an idea; one that doesn’t mature into a fuller idea straight away. Instead, it stays swimming around at the back of your mind. It may well keep coming back to you in one form or another. The first step is to acknowledge them as vague intuitions and allow them to be a bit fuzzy and ill-defined. The second step is to share them with others and to gather new knowledge. Finally, all that’s left is to see where it leads. Some ideas won’t go anywhere, but some will evolve into pieces that finally click into place.
Many ideas may exist for a long time in hunch form. For instance, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, had no single epiphany. It came about slowly and took at least a decade to mature. To help the process you could try what Steven Johnson himself does and keep your own hunch journal**. Johnson has kept his own hunch journal for the past 10 years and written down every random idea he has had, whatever it may be about. He tries to go back and re-read this journal every six months or so, to remind himself of his hunches and to see what’s shifted, review what hunches may now fit together that didn’t previously, and to see which ideas to share with others to see where they may go.
What was the last hunch you had? What keeps coming back to mind that hasn’t quite been clear? If you can pull this to mind then it could be the start of a much bigger idea.
REFERENCES